


Alpha

by voodoochild



Category: Carnivale
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-22
Updated: 2010-03-22
Packaged: 2017-10-08 06:10:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alpha: the first; the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alpha

**Author's Note:**

> Spoils the entire series, from the pilot to "New Canaan, CA".

_"In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters."_ \- NRSV Bible. Genesis 1:1-3.

~*~*~*~*~

In the beginning, it was just Irina and her mother. No screaming fits because Lucius had witnessed one of Alexei's tantrums again. No apocryphal, apostatic certainty that, had she been born male, she would have driven her mother mad and her father to fight in a war they'd known nothing about. No gospels of Plemina's making, about Alexei rising to messianic heights and she being his right hand.

For six years, it was "my beloved child", not "Ira-take-care-of-the-baby". Irina Belyakov, apple of her father's eye (he'd pick them for her from the orchard near the pond) and boon to her mother's heart.

But Iris Crowe barely remembers those antediluvian days. For her world had begun with a newborn's wail (_his name is Alexei, and you must protect him with your life_) and cemented into place on the banks of a river. She would always be first (the first to know his destiny, first to leave the safety of _Mat'Rossiya_ behind, always and forever his first), but now his welfare superseded her own. She would know suffering, know sacrifice, know sin and redemption with that creed in mind.

And kept it for forty-seven years, because though the name "Alexei Belyakov" had died alongside their mother and their past in that train wreck - the boy, the man, the hopes and dreams of their mother, and the fears and nightmares of their father, lived on in Justin Crowe.

Sometimes, in the ringing silence of a locked door, or the curl of a lip into a smug smile, she wished the icy waters of the river had claimed them both. Had pulled them down beneath abysmal waves, closing far above two heads. Her own dark, indistinguishable from the water or the mud at the bottom of the channel. Alexei's fair, shining like a fallen star (for he was the son of the morning star, after all) through the primordial waves. Sealed them in a place darker than sin (because then, perhaps, they wouldn't have sinned so much) and more silent than the gulf between them that began in St. Paul, widened in Mintern, and that sprawling New Canaan had just made all the wider.

But then she remembers the fervent glint in Justin's eyes (blue, not black), identical whether he was preaching to the masses or inscribing a far more private litany on Iris' body. She remembers Sunday lunches with Norman and Rose after church, and Justin's abortive attempts at cooking. She remembers him cheering during nervous choir solos, valedictory speeches where she wore her pride on her sleeve, and dozens of years squeezing into the same bed out of necessity, love, and just plain habit.

She remembers . . .

And she realizes that she could no more have wished for his destruction in that river than she could have succeeded in bringing about his destruction in that cornfield. He is her brother, after all, and she loves him.

Her greatest sin. Loving him not wisely, but too well. He would always and forever be her Alexei, little-boy-lost on a riverbank as dark as those godforsaken eyes she's become all too familiar with. The light darkened to her dark light. The innate grace to her natal damnation. The war to her peace, because Alexei means "warrior" and Irina means "peace".

And since he'd been placed into her six-year-old arms, peace had always been with him.


End file.
